Truth offers some sad comfort

Though she was told not to expect his return, Christel DeSimone believes there will never be closure after her 23-year-old son was lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

At the same time, Robert J. Hymel's widow remembers how he was shot down over North Vietnam 29 years ago and is thankful for those years with her husband, now among the confirmed dead in the attack on the Pentagon.

Some families have found comfort in cold truth; for others, it has brought only more questions.

Christian DeSimone

Christian DeSimone was no stranger to disaster areas. He assessed damage at disaster sites around the world, most recently after a deadly oil refinery fire in England.

The 23-year-old resident of Ringwood, N.J., was a forensic accountant for a firm headquartered on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower. His mother fears her son's familiarity with grim situations, coupled with a lifelong desire to help people, may have ultimately contributed to his death.

"I'm sure that, even if he had a chance to escape, he died trying to help people," Christel DeSimone said of her son, a onetime linebacker at the University of Rhode Island. "He was so big and strong and fearless, and he had such a sense of responsibility."

Which is why it was uncharacteristic that DeSimone woke up 45 minutes late and forgot his lunch on Sept. 11. It was also a reason to hold out hope--for a while, his mother thought the delay may have kept him from getting to his office before the hijacked planes hit.

"I talked to him for the last time on his cell phone on his way to work," his mother said. "I tried to convince him to come back to get the lunch, but he liked being in the office early."

Christian had followed his late father into forensic accounting and had been studying to take the certified public accountant's exam when the trade center was attacked, his mother said.

For several days afterward, his mother and 20-year-old sister, Martina, scoured Web sites and news reports for any word of his whereabouts. A group of 15 friends--including DeSimone's girlfriend, Jennifer--searched New York hospitals.

On Sept. 15, representatives from DeSimone's company, Marsh USA/Caps Group, informed his family that no one working above the 95th floor had been found.

"That's when I gave up hope," his mother said.

She said the family has plans for a memorial service but has not yet decided when to hold it.

"I'm not ready to bring myself to deal with it," she said. "People talk about closure, but I don't like that word. For me, this will never be closed."

Robert J. Hymel

Robert J. Hymel was a young Air Force pilot when his B-52 was shot down by a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile during Operation Linebacker II, an 11-day offensive in December 1972. Another American pilot cut Hymel from the wreckage after the bomber crash-landed near Hanoi.

They escaped before it burst into flames. Only two members of the five-man crew survived, said his wife, Beatriz "Pat" Hymel.

"He was administered last rites, and the doctors said they didn't even know why he lived," Beatriz Hymel said. "They thought maybe it was because he had never met his daughter," then only 2 months old.

"I feel like God gave us another 29 years," she added, noting that some of her friends lost their husbands in Vietnam. "Our daughter got to know her father and his granddaughter got to know her grandfather. When I really needed him in my life, he was there."

Robert Hymel was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal and the Purple Heart for his Vietnam service.

His wife, an elementary school principal, said she served as a foil to her husband, whom she called "a bad little boy." In his younger days, she said he partied with military buddies on Friday and Saturday evenings, though still managed to attend church on Sundays.

He received a bachelor's degree in 1969 in industrial engineering from Southwestern Louisiana University and later obtained a master's degree in business administration from New England College.

Hymel, 55, of Woodbridge, Va., retired in the early 1990s as a lieutenant colonel after more than 20 years in the Air Force. He was working as a management analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon when it was attacked.

He was in the basement of the building and was preparing to move to a new workstation when the building was struck, his wife said. The new desk, which he was to occupy the following day, was in an area spared from destruction.

A daughter, Natalie Conner, also survives him.

Daniel McNeal

The week before the Sept. 11 attacks, Daniel McNeal, 29, a financial analyst who dreamed of being a Jesuit priest, drove to Boston from Washington, D.C., to have lunch with a friend recently diagnosed with Crohn's disease.

McNeal, who worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center's south tower for the past year, loved his friends and had an endearing habit in one-on-one conversations of slightly leaning toward the person with whom he was speaking, his relatives said.

"He always smiled and had a very gentle way," said McNeal's cousin, Stacy Danko of Towson, Md., where McNeal went to high school. "He had such a way with people."

McNeal earned a degree in finance from Boston College and an MBA from Georgetown University. He was an analyst at Sandler O'Neill & Partners and lived in New Jersey. When the first tower was hit, he left his mother a message saying he was fine and "getting the heck out of Dodge." Then he called his father, in hospice care battling lung cancer, and told him not to worry. Moments later, his father watched the collapse of the south tower on television.

Though McNeal hoped to become a priest and a professor at Georgetown, his mother, Kitty, who had been a nun for 15 years, encouraged him to see the world and explore his possibilities. At his funeral, people spoke of McNeal's leadership qualities and his kindness. His remains were recovered, providing the family with a small degree of comfort.

"It allows us to know he's not out there suffering," said Danko. `We can bury him. Have a funeral. That was special to us."

Robert J. Maxwell

When Robert J. Maxwell didn't come home from work at the Pentagon, his wife figured he had gotten stuck in the snarl of traffic after the building was evacuated. Then she waited for the page that wouldn't come.

The Manassas, Va., man had worked as a civilian budget analyst for the U.S. Army for 29 years. He was just a year away from retirement. He planned to play a lot of golf, do the books for wife Karen Greenberg's psychology practice and basically take care of her.

Maxwell, 54, appeared to be conservative but wasn't, his wife said. He enjoyed cooking Southwestern and Creole food, listened to Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker, and joked with a dry wit. "He had a very vast sense of humor," Greenberg said. "There was an absurdity to it."

The former Texan loved to do crossword puzzles and teased his wife of three years about being a native New Yorker.

They were opposites, she said. "But we blended. He gave me grounding, and I gave him creativity."

Tatiana Ryjova was thinking about changing jobs, but working in the meantime as a meeting coordinator for Regus Business Centres at the World Trade Center was still worth the long commute into the city.

Though Ryjova had been with the company for the past year, her friend Deborah Monroe said Ryjova wanted to work closer to home to spend more time with her husband, Vasily, and their two young sons.

"She told me she didn't want to go into the city," Monroe said. It was a two-hour commute from the Ryjovas' home in Somers, N.Y., and she had been asking about jobs in Connecticut, where Monroe and Ryjova had worked together in the past.

Ryjova came to the United States in the early 1990s as a tour guide for a Russian vacation company. She held a master's degree in education from a Russian university and had a penchant for languages. She persuaded her husband--who was still living in Russia at the time--to move to the states and settle permanently in New York.

More or less.

Together, they bought houses in the New York suburbs, fixed them up and sold them, a process they repeated a number of times in recent years, Monroe said.

At the same time, Tatiana Ryjova had worked in the training and development office of a Medicaid group, at a computer training and professional development organization and, most recently, at Regus.

Along the way, she collected friends like stamps, Monroe said. Other Russian emigrants were instant friends, of course, but so were fellow churchgoers, coworkers and clients from every place she had worked. Ryjova went beyond compassion, said Monroe. "She'd take your side. She'd get all mad and angry at people for you."

When laid off from a Connecticut company a year ago, Ryjova was quickly hired by Regus as the company opened its offices on the 93rd floor of the trade center's south tower.

Though the families of others in the building had begun holding memorial services, Ryjova officially remained among the missing.

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